Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  He saw his impending death, the secret theme of Memories, as the logical outcome of a society that did not value him, did not protect him—and never had.

  David called me on April 10 to say that in five days he was going to start driving across the country to do readings from Close to the Knives, which would reach bookstores that month. “I carry a whole blanket of fears in my psychology,” he told me, “and I think this trip could be a big breakthrough for me.” He was going to take a typewriter and a sketchpad and try to relax. Then when he got back at the end of May, he planned to start another experimental drug trial in Boston. In the journal, though, he wrote that he was probably crazy not to cancel this trip. He’d felt nauseated all week.

  On April 12, David underwent a bone marrow biopsy to test for lymphoma. They took marrow from his hip, and the next day he was still in pain, “kicked by a tiny mule,” he said when he wrote about it in the journal. He could calm himself by thinking, “I’m here. This is the chair, the bed, the shelf …” The cross-country trip was on hold.

  “I’ve been depressed for years and tears since Peter died and Tom’s diagnosis and my own diagnosis,” he wrote in the journal. “When I was younger I could frame out a sense of possibility or hope, abstract as it was, given my life felt like shit. I’ve lost that ability. Too much surrounds me in terms of fears … the recent loss of mobility where I am too terrified to go long distances for fear of death or illness in unfamiliar environs. Knowing I’ve been depressed, realizing the extent recently, makes it all more confusing because I don’t know, I can’t separate what in my fatigue and exhaustion and illness is from depression, what is from disease. One feeds on another until I want to scream.”

  David’s self-imposed isolation was the opposite of what he needed. He thrived on interacting with people. It’s why he collaborated so much. But he’d decided that no one could comprehend what he was going through, so he kept to himself, which made him more depressed, which made him feel more isolated.

  The big list of complaints he eventually made, the one in which he broke down what had happened with Marion Scemama, would also include the friends who were now telling him things like “You look good, you’re a survivor.” He added a complaint about his boyfriend: “With Tom, I can’t verbalize my illness or dying—he can’t handle it. I get so lonely in this illness that I wish I could go to bed and die but I’m afraid to take my own life right now.”

  The observation about Tom would prove to be quite unfounded, but during this period David wouldn’t even tell him if he had a fever. As a rule, he and Tom spoke on the phone every day if they didn’t see each other. But one night, David told him, “I feel more alone when you call than when you don’t call.”

  Recalling how irritable and uncommunicative David was about his illness at this point, Tom said, “I think he assumed that people should be able to intuit how to deal with him. As much as I would try to figure out what to do, it was really hard. Clearly something was going on emotionally with him very, very deeply, but you couldn’t touch it. I just couldn’t get there. So that comment came out of that kind of struggle. But it really hurt. I felt so bad when he said that. I didn’t know what to do.”

  David wrote later in his journal:

  I don’t know why I feel this, but I do and I have to say it. I can’t control myself. Nobody can touch what’s going on inside me, so maybe that’s the bottom line problem. I have to get used to it, get used to fevers periodically. Sore throat strep throat I’m just beginning to get. Took a little mirror to look at my throat, bent over a lamp and found my mouth full of fungus again. What do I do? [Tom] slammed the phone down and I don’t blame him because it was brutally clear what I said but I can’t pretend it feels different. When he calls lately it’s usually at the end of the day to say goodnight and my head is so filled with fear and darkness it’s almost an insult. Everything is scary and I feel shook with the reality of the situation. I AM DYING SLOWLY. CHANCES DON’T LOOK TOO GOOD.

  Marion had called David sometime in March. They began speaking again, and the connection intensified in April. David’s phone bill showed fifteen calls to Paris between April 6 and the beginning of May. One would call, and after they talked awhile, they’d hang up and the other would call back, so they could share the cost. One night they talked for four hours.

  David told her about wanting to do a book tour, but by the end of April, he’d narrowed that down to one stop: San Francisco. He also wanted to revisit his favorite spots in the Southwest. He asked Marion to come with him. “This will be my last trip,” he told her more than once. “My last trip.”

  “I was kind of scared to do it,” she said. “I knew how hard it would be. He was sick and I didn’t know if I would handle it, but at the same time, I didn’t think I could say no.”

  During one of their phone calls, he told her, “I have a list of things to discuss with you before we decide to do this.”

  Marion thought, how American! “But in fact it was great,” she said, “because we had to define what kind of relationship we had, what kind of relationship we didn’t want to have anymore, and what kind of relationship we dreamed of having during this trip. Then I said, ‘I should have my list, because you’re hard to deal with too.’ But I didn’t prepare a list. I may have asked about two or three things, but the main thing I said was, ‘I want you to swear, really swear, that whatever happens during this trip, you will never reject me the way you did before. I went through a strong depression. It has been too hard for me.’ … And he laughed and said, ‘No, no, no, I promise.’ “

  They planned to fly to Albuquerque and rent a car. Marion came to New York several days beforehand and helped David get ready—doing errands, the legwork. Every day when six o’clock came around, though, he would ask her to leave the loft because Tom was coming over. Marion didn’t think this was odd. David was about to leave town for three weeks, so of course he’d want to spend time with Tom. Then one day, Tom was on his way over and she was still there. “I didn’t understand why David was so nervous,” she said, “but I left.” She went to see someone in the neighborhood and came back along Second Avenue just as Tom and David were leaving the building. “I was going to walk over to them and say hello to Tom,” she said. “David saw me, and I could see him freaking out.” He signaled at her to walk away. Then he and Tom crossed the street. “That was an image I kept in my mind.”

  Tom knew that David was traveling with Marion but he thought they were meeting in New Mexico. He did not know that Marion was in New York. Nor did David tell Tom that this was going to be his “last trip.”

  Phil Zwickler died of AIDS on May 7, 1991, at the age of thirty-six.

  On May 8, David and Marion arrived in Albuquerque. They rented a car and drove to Monument Valley, which was probably their first stop. But then they headed for Las Vegas. According to Marion, there was a show there that David wanted to see. It had been running for ten years, or maybe twenty or thirty. People had played the same roles for decades. That was all she could remember of David’s description. As they drove, David joked that maybe they should get married. In Las Vegas, it only took five minutes. What would François think, he asked. Marion wondered what Tom would think.

  She said that she’d actually broached the idea of marriage earlier, maybe in ’89. She couldn’t remember the date, but they’d written some letters about it. After his diagnosis, he worried about how he would afford health care, since he had no insurance. She told him that if they married, he would be able to get free health care in France. They fantasized further. They’d live in a loft together. They’d generate income by making T-shirts. Tom would move in too, and Marion would get him a job as a cook—she knew people. “We lived in this dream for two weeks, three weeks,” she said, “but if he had asked me, I would have done it. I think it made him feel better to know that there was this possibility.”

  So they were approaching Las Vegas, she said, “with odd but sweet feelings for each other,” and they stopped for gas
on the edge of town. They were within sight of the glitz and the kitsch when they saw a girl walk out of a convenience store with a big frozen drink that was pink and green or blue—something so aggressively artificial it seemed the symbol of the city. David asked her if she really wanted to go into Las Vegas.

  She said, it’s up to you.

  He said, let’s drive to Death Valley.

  She thought maybe if they’d gone into Las Vegas they would have gotten married, and that would have been a mess, “but there was this kind of romanticism sometime between him and me, like we could go together forever.”

  Certainly when they worked together, they’d been capable of an almost uncanny rapport. But the perceptions they had on this trip often seemed to originate on two different planets.

  When David wrote in his journal about these first days on the road, he said nothing about Las Vegas, marriage, or even Marion:

  I’m in a constant flux of anxieties about my body and its exhaustion and strange waves of illness. I feel like my brain and my body are separated and my brain refuses to acknowledge that my body wants to shut down or throw up or burn with fever. Sometimes it hits just a few hours after waking—if I’m lucky it waits until late afternoon or evening. I hate it. And I push myself to keep moving or else consign myself to the bed in surrender which depresses me, makes me angry, makes everything dark until I wish for death to relieve me. I get tense and suddenly everything is too much. I think I’ll break down if even one more thing confronts me. Even a simple choice makes me feel like I want to scream and disappear.

  I know I need to adjust and accept my body and its levels of energy but it complicates everything. My refusal to accept is the struggle. I feel extremely alone in all this as if confronted with no choice when I should have a choice. I’m too young for this yet I’m feeling old from all the deaths. Phil died a few days ago on the 7th of May. I couldn’t feel anything but maybe a little relief for him that it was over. That lasted until evening of the 8th. Then I got scared and sad. Now I can’t believe all the death I’ve seen. It’s so outrageous, it’s like a long slow fiction that overtakes what you come to know as “life.” It’s like waking up one morning to see that the sky has disappeared and it never comes back no matter how patiently you wait.

  When they drove into Death Valley, they stopped the car to watch a beautiful sunset. They walked a ways and wrote in the sand, “David and Marion Death Valley May 1991.” They started speaking about how it would be nice for David to die there. They could place beautiful fabric on the sand and light candles and it would be dusk. Marion would be with him. And Tom. To that, David said, “We’d have to put a curtain up between you.”

  Marion said, “What are you talking about?”

  David told her, “Tom never wanted to share my friends with me, in any way. He doesn’t understand my relationship with you.”

  Of course, David did not really want Tom to know his friends. Marion was not aware of this, since she had met Tom easily enough. So had Patrick. Conveniently, both lived far away. Among David’s New York friends, Judy Glantzman knew of Tom’s existence but did not socialize with him. The only friends of David’s who did so were Gary Schneider and John Erdman. They had even accompanied Tom and David on one of their trips to New Orleans.

  More typical was Norman Frisch, who had no idea that David had a boyfriend until sometime in 1991. “He seemed to be keeping Tom in a corner of his life that only he entered,” Frisch said. “David was very paranoid about people plotting. I’m talking about his friends. He just didn’t want anyone talking about him or planning anything for or about him that wasn’t in his direct control and that he wasn’t hearing and seeing. That was part of why he was so insistent on keeping these worlds of people apart from one another.”

  David writing in his journal on the last trip. (Photograph by Marion Scemama)

  And that evening in Death Valley, Marion began to sense this. She asked David if he wanted her and Tom to fight. “I wanted to let David understand that maybe he did things wrong,” she said. “Maybe he manipulated my relationship with him to get Tom jealous.”

  Then David told her that Tom did not know they were traveling together, that that was why he’d waved her away on Second Avenue. This was not true. (Before David left town, Tom told him, “Push her off a mesa for me.”) But Marion believed David, believed Tom didn’t know, and she was upset that Tom didn’t know.

  She thought that now Tom would hate her—because she was doing the “last trip” and he was not. But the real issue between them was probably not resolvable. “Maybe I was jealous of the intensity of their connection,” Tom said. “But mostly, I felt that she wanted to swallow him. Just essentially capture him in some way.”

  “I almost had tears,” Marion said. “I realized I would never be next to David when he died. I thought of all these things we were supposed to do together.” According to Marion, David had asked her to photograph him just after he died, the way he’d photographed Hujar. Now she knew that would be impossible. “So I start getting nasty at David, teasing him, and the charm was finished. That day the charm was finished.”

  David sent a postcard to Judy Glantzman the day they got to Death Valley, however, telling her, “Marion has been a pleasure to be with. I’m the one I feel must be difficult when I don’t feel well.” They spent five days in Death Valley, and it isn’t really clear when things started to go wrong.

  David loved the desert, loved contemplating the emptiness and driving through it at speeds that let him fantasize about becoming airborne. He did not mention Marion in the journal until they were about a week into the trip, so this may have been where the tension began. She had gone for a walk in the desert and came back with a story about a black bird that came walking up, circled her, and then flew away. David remarked that “maybe it thought you were carrion.” Marion did not know that word, and when David explained, she was irritated. According to Marion, they did not have a fight but she did not appreciate the joke he was making. As she put it, “Sometimes I don’t have humor.”

  “She gets on my nerves sometimes,” he wrote in the journal, “but then again, I don’t do well being with anybody these days for too much time. I know she wants it to be different between me and her. I know. But that’s the breaks, that’s how it is in my body and mind, months and months of isolation don’t break so easy.… The silence and the tension is rising really it’s the music underneath that silence and its stirring the violence I carry … fueling whatever potential I have for being a killer … and I’m so tempted does she know I’m so tempted to turn the wheel, its just the turn of a wheel, its just a turn of the wrist and we will fly we will burn away we will fall away we will jet away a killer in a jet plane with four wheels and a windshield oh life is so free in America.”

  They got to San Francisco on May 17. David’s old friend Philip Zimmerman, who knew Marion from the East Village days, came to hear him read. He remembered that during this two-day visit “David and Marion were bickering and complaining about each other. One would take me aside and say terrible things and then the other would do the same.”

  David introduced Zimmerman and Marion to Amy Scholder. He read at the gay bookstore A Different Light, and afterward the four of them walked to City Hall to join the AIDS Candlelight Memorial and Mobilization. Marion walked with Zimmerman and watched as David and Amy engaged in intense conversation all the way there. David wrote in his journal that he had felt an “instant deep connection” with Amy. He thought she was beautiful, sexy, and smart and “if she were a guy I’d maybe marry her.” (He said none of this to Amy.) But the next morning, he resented it when Marion called Amy and invited her to join them for breakfast before they left town. “Then she started torturing me with the possibility of taking pictures of Amy and me,” he complained. He hated being photographed in public. Marion had also taken pictures the morning before and he’d asked her to stop and she hadn’t. This time she said she’d photograph only Amy, but David was tense all throu
gh breakfast.

  During one of the rare moments when Amy was alone with David, she said, “Oh, Marion’s great,” and he said, “She’s driving me crazy.”

  As he and Marion drove out of town, headed back to Death Valley, David recounted an incident at a San Francisco porn theater. He’d gone there to jerk off, something he hadn’t done in months. A guy sat next to him and put his hands all over him and then tried to suck his dick while David rebuffed him. So David told Marion all the intimate physical details, all the complicated things that had been going through his mind. He felt he had laid himself bare, more than usual. That evening as they drove through Bakersfield looking for a place to eat, she began to tell him about a sexual encounter she’d had in Marrakech when she was traveling with a girlfriend. She’d met two French guys, was attracted to one of them, and ended up having sex with both of them. But she stopped the story at “a point of intimate detail,” as David put it. She wouldn’t go any further. To David, this was betrayal. “I told her I would never again talk about intimate details of certain experiences if she couldn’t tell me about hers. I felt emotional in this. Hurt. I wanted her to hear me. It was a flurry of emotions and it swept into the moving car.” They found a steak house with fake Western decor. “She said the fact I pushed her to speak of the details made her suddenly freeze and unable to remember or that she needed time or something.”

  “I was kidding,” Marion remembered. “I was playing like a little girl who didn’t know what to say, and then all of a sudden he just blew out, yelling at me, ‘How dare you.’ Then I started to really freak out. It paralyzed me because then we were back to something heavy. And so I couldn’t speak anymore. We went to a kind of pub. It was dark and we had a difficult dinner. We couldn’t speak to each other. We tried to make it work, but something was broken.”